Atlas Mislead:
UN Book Exposes Flaws of
Environmentalist Argument
By Christopher J. Falvey
US
When I fly, I always insist
on taking the window seat. Maybe it’s the
12-year-old boy in me- I like seeing the world
as Matchbox cars and ants-as-people scurrying
about. Even as an adult and a resident of a large
metropolis, I’m always curious as to exactly
what this modern expanse of planned communities
and shopping meccas really looks like from above.
I recently took a flight from New Orleans, across
the entire center of the country, into Chicago.
Upon the flight’s descent, about 50 miles
outside of Chicago, I had a revelation. Or, more
apt, a bit of confusion. I had flown 800-plus
miles, most of it unobstructed by clouds, and
all along I was asking myself- where exactly is
this supposedly overwhelming urban sprawl? Certainly
there were splotches or urbanity here and there.
Certainly there were rare specks of civilization
within a virtual universe of green and brown.
But sprawl? Relative to the entirety of the journey,
I just didn’t see it.
All of this was little more than an interesting
observation until the following day, when I read
of the United Nations releasing an atlas entitled
“One Planet Many People”- a book comparing
both modern and decades-old satellite photos of
certain areas, supposedly showing the global devastation
of man. Interesting. The intention of the UN project
certainly contradicted my observations, but I
assumed they had a lot more resources for statistical
analysis than I did during the few cross-country
trips I’ve taken- so I dug into the book.
What I found, however, wasn’t actually a
shocking exposé on how man is destroying
his planet. A valiant marketing effort, maybe.
Ignoring the pithy comments throughout the volume,
and the media’s guesswork reviews of it,
the book- when examined beyond the surface- is
actually an excellent exposé on the flaws
of the fundamental environmentalist argument.
Missing the “of”
While environmentalist causes are almost always
born anecdotally, they’re certainly not
always absent of statistics- and the pages of
this UN atlas are chock full of them. Just enough,
as they say, to be dangerous. You see, the facts
and figures sprinkled throughout this book- and
the bulk of the environmentalist argument in total-
are not necessarily invalid, but they always seem
to be missing one concept. That concept is “of.”
X number of acres of rain forest have been cut
down. Ok, but of how many total? Cities have grown
X amount per year, on average. I believe you,
but how much of our remaining space is left? Carbon
dioxide emissions for the decade were X tons.
Great, that seems like a lot, but what specific
events are honestly going to happen because of
this?
Unfortunately, the caveat question “of”
often elicits a lot of “I don’t knows”,
“maybes”, and “possiblies.”
Unless you’re one who believes the end result
must be dire merely because its source statistic
appears in print, the numbers presented by the
traditional environmentalist argument are rarely
meaningful.
Close zoom, lost focus
Fine, so people don’t like math- math is
boring, I get it. People do like pretty pictures
- hence, to prove its point, the UN is releasing
an atlas rather than volumes of statistical analysis.
Now, I love nifty satellite photos as much as
the next guy - but upon looking at these pictures,
any search for true significance will elicit far
less than the proverbial one-thousand words.
Photo after photo - comparing specific areas decades
ago with those today - you cannot deny that humans
have had some effect on the planet. But how much?
Seeing as the majority of photos are close-ups
of specific cities, the best I have to go off
of shows that coastlines are colored differently,
a few trees are now buildings, and cities are
growing. Yet again, as with most arguments from
environmentalists, you’re left to assume
that merely because some form of photographic
evidence exists, it must be enough to be “globally
devastating.”
Much of focus of the atlas is urban sprawl. A
subject that I - along with most environmentalists
- have plenty of circumstantial knowledge of.
I live in the suburbs - exactly halfway between
urban-industrial-monstrosity and out-in-the-sticks.
I see on a daily basis where the argument comes
from culturally. City slickers don’t like
having to drive farther and farther to reach those
quaint little villages where time stands still.
Ruralists don’t like their sleepy country
roads turned into shopping malls, cookie-cutter
houses, and golf courses. More often than not
the first and most intense arguments are personal,
and the environmentalism is backed into.
However, when you look at it globally (which,
ironically, this atlas from the UN doesn’t
often bother to do), the effects add up to a heck
of a lot less than “devastating.”
Go ahead, look at any global population density
map, or just take a cross-country road trip. There
is still plenty of “out-in-the-sticks”
for us to eat up. In the end, even after millennia
of seemingly massive population growth, humans
still take up a miniscule amount of the planet.
Multiply it by five, ten, fifteen and it still
remains basically infinitesimal.
The collection of photographs in this book - and
most photographic environmental evidence, in reality
- only proves one thing: our effects on the planet
are really evident only when zoomed in.
Microcosm, macrocosm, let’s call the whole
thing off
Beyond the admittedly pretty pictures, this attempt
at an atlas of man’s destruction crystallizes
but one thing: environmentalists love microcosms.
If something can be proven gravely perilous in
a 40 square mile area - even anecdotally - it
must then extrapolate out globally. It’s
been the linchpin of the environmentalist movement
forever: coal smoke in a few large cities during
the early 1900’s, a few miles of coastline
destroyed by an oil tanker crash, the mere existence
of pollutants in relatively tiny metropolitan
areas.
We’ve heard it seemingly forever, but the
global devastation never quite seems to happen.
We’ve been safe thus far - throughout industrial
revolutions, oil landgrabs, and periods of rampant
consumption - and there has yet to be any solid,
fact-based rationale to explain how we won’t
always find a way to grow beyond slight environmental
problems.
The doomsday drum, nonetheless, continues to beat.
I got a kick out of Reuters’ particular
review of the UN atlas, as it summarized the foolishness
of the environmentalist attitude perfectly:
“Page after page of the 300-page book illustrate
in before-and-after pictures from space the disfigurement
of the face of the planet wrought by human activities.”
Disfigurement? Maybe. The face of the planet?
Hardly. Environmentalists can indeed see the forest,
but apparently for something exaggeratedly different
than the trees.
(Christopher J. Falvey is the editor of the online
magazine THE VN/VO. He can be contacted at http://www.vnvo.com)
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